It is no coincidence that we have survived as a nation over the centuries, nor that we have liberated ourselves from so many conquerors. We have had, beyond God, the shield of our ancestors, regardless of whether some doubt that we are their “descendants.”

We did not want our nation, the Greek nation, to be lost. And neither did the foreigners, the elite of Europe and America. It would have been a great and irreversible loss for humanity and its evolution from darkness to civilization if we had disappeared.

This is one of the reasons why a small country like ours, without remarkable credentials in its modern history, occupies so much, and disproportionately so, of the international public’s attention. This is also why they don’t let us fall into the “abyss,” whether economic or military.

I write all this as an introduction to the news I read on the second page of the New York Times—I have a sensitivity to print editions—titled “Myths, Plagues, and Battles, on the 12th Floor.” The article discusses how employees of the New York Times gather every six weeks on the 12th floor of the newspaper’s building in Manhattan to study the Iliad, translated by Emily Wilson.

Wilson is a professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

She writes: “On a Tuesday afternoon in June, on a faraway continent, a war was underway. A queen had been abducted. A fickle god had started a plague. And a heavenly hero with a weak heel was heading into battle.”

“The war,” she continues, “might have been mythical, but on the 12th floor of The New York Times building in Manhattan, a reading group of Times employees was taking it very seriously. The club had gathered, as it had done many times before, to discuss Emily Wilson’s translation of the “Iliad,” a Greek epic set during the Trojan War and composed around the eighth or seventh century B.C. by one or more poets we call Homer. (Some scholars argue that Homer was a group of people.)”

I don’t know if there is anything like this elsewhere in humanity. Dozens of people—60 were at their recent gathering—who are different from each other, coming together to study a book unrelated to them.

There is nothing else like it that transcends nations, cultures, religions, and languages and serves as the common denominator, this supreme masterpiece for all humanity—the Iliad.

Written by our own, Homer.